The USPTO captures the queries issued by their examiners to find prior art during the application process. Since ~2003  this information is published for each application in a document called  "Examiner's search strategy and results"  which is freely available on PAIR as a scanned PDF. A patent application might have several of these documents attached, especially if the application went through several amendments. Despite the documents name, the patents that were finally found relevant by the examiner are not stated in this document but in a seperate document, with code 892.

In order to obtain these documents proceed as follows:

1. Go to PAIR (Patent Application Information Retrieval Website of the USPTO)
2. Search for a specific patent number, e.g. 7123321.
3. Click on "Image File Wrapper". (For some patents, especially those published before 2003 this tab might not be available.)

 

 

1. Search Reports have the Document code "SRNT" and the document description "Examiner's search strategy and results"
2. the patents  that were finally selected by the examiner, are found in the document with code "892" and the document description "List of references cited by examiner"

 

A SRNT Document is a table with one line for each search query that was issued by the examiner. The following informations are captured for each search query:

• Search Query used (e.g. ("color filter" with pattern) and (LCD "liquid crystal"))
• The number of hits
• the Databases on which the query was performed (e.g. US-PGPUB; USPAT; USOCR; EPO; JPO; DERWENT; IBM_TDB)
• Default Operator (e.g. OR)
• Plurals (ON or OFF)
• a Time Stamp
• a Reference ID which is used to reuse or combine queries (e.g. Query = S15 and S18)

 

 

Exemplary SRNT document.

USPTO uses a tool called  Examiner Automated Search Tool (EAST) to perform and record the queries.